Scalable Data Plane Caching for Kubernetes

Computation offloading to the programmable data plane enabled the acceleration of key-value stores which offer coordination services for large-scale data centres. Previous research reduced the response latency of key-value requests by half through deploying the store in the programmable data plane. In this work, we examine Kubernetes’ central store, etcd, as a candidate for deployment in data plane. We discuss performance and scalability limitations existing in the default architecture of Kubernetes and how these can be alleviated through data plane offloading. Moreover, we investigate previous design decisions of in-network caching mechanisms that led to increased traffic generation and latency. We propose a new in-network key-value store platform that maintains strong consistency and fault-tolerance while improving performance and scalability over the state-of-the-art.